--- title: Should I Eat Yogurt Covered Snacks and Yogurt Covered Raisins? description: Yogurt-coated raisins sound like a double-dose health food. But don’t be fooled—a shell of “yogurt” contains some very un-yogurtlike things canonical: https://time.com/3945988/yogurt-covered-raisins/ author: Mandy Oaklander article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2015-07-23T14:20:27.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-05-11T05:02:40.000Z article:section: Health og:title: Should I Eat Yogurt-Covered Snacks? og:description: Yogurt-coated raisins sound like a double-dose health food. But don’t be fooled—a shell of “yogurt” contains some very un-yogurtlike things og:url: https://time.com/3945988/yogurt-covered-raisins/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt729c4e5477e34886/69885b993c1639f155458e90/screen-shot-2015-07-20-at-12-25-00-pm.png?branch=production&width=1103&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1103 og:image:height: 620 og:image:alt: yogurt covered pretzels og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Should I Eat Yogurt-Covered Snacks? twitter:description: Yogurt-coated raisins sound like a double-dose health food. But don’t be fooled—a shell of “yogurt” contains some very un-yogurtlike things twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt729c4e5477e34886/69885b993c1639f155458e90/screen-shot-2015-07-20-at-12-25-00-pm.png?branch=production&width=1103&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Should I Eat Yogurt-Covered Snacks? > Sponsored content. 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Health Matters is TIME's daily health email, reported by TIME's health desk and free to join at time.com/newsletters. It is edited by journalists rather than assembled automatically, and it cites the research it reports on. #### Is Health Matters free? Yes. Health Matters is a free daily newsletter from TIME, available at time.com/newsletters. #### Who reads TIME's Health Matters newsletter? Its audience is broadly health-conscious, with a professional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators.  by [Mandy Oaklander](https://time.com/author/mandy-oaklander/)  ## Mandy Oaklander Oaklander is a senior editor at TIME. Jul 23, 2015 2:20 PM UTC  Illustration by Lon Tweeten for TIME  by [Mandy Oaklander](https://time.com/author/mandy-oaklander/)  ## Mandy Oaklander Oaklander is a senior editor at TIME. Jul 23, 2015 2:20 PM UTC **5/5 experts say no.** Yogurt-coated fruit sounds like a double-dosage health food. But don’t be fooled—a shell of “yogurt” contains some very un-yogurtlike things, according to all five of our experts. “While these coatings may be called ‘yogurt,’ they are really a kind of ‘frosting’ of which yogurt is an ingredient,” says **David** **Katz**, MD, director of the Yale University Prevention Research Center. The real stars of yogurt coatings are sugar—and _not_ the kind that naturally occurs in dairy foods—and oil. “Having the name ‘yogurt’ in the mix is supposed to make it all okay,” Katz says. “It does not.” In fact, the stuff that makes up yogurt coating—typically sugar, partially hydrogenated palm kernel oil, yogurt powder, emulsifiers and salt—is a far cry from its namesake. “One should definitely not think about these as a health food,” says **Mario** **Kratz**, PhD, a dairy researcher and nutrition scientist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. “I’d place most of these snacks in the same category as candy bars.” At first glance, the nutritional stats don’t seem so bad; for a popular brand, a 1/4 cup serving of vanilla yogurt raisins has 19 grams of sugar and 5 grams of fat, while the same serving size of regular raisins actually has more sugar—29 grams of it—but no fat. But that’s far from a nutritional wash. Since yogurt-covered raisins are so much chunkier than their natural, unadulterated peers, you get far fewer raisins per serving and far more of the unnatural kind of sugar. There’s another danger to these snack food “impostors,” says Dina Rose, PhD, a sociologist and feeding expert of the blog [It’s Not About Nutrition: The Art & Science of Teaching Kids to Eat Right](http://www.itsnotaboutnutrition.com/). “For kids, yogurt-covered snacks like yogurt-covered (or really, oil-covered) raisins and pretzels teach that these foods should look and taste like candy,” she says. Getting a kid to recognize that a yogurt-covered snack should only be eaten occasionally, she says, is the tricky part. **J. Bruce German**, PhD, professor and director of the Foods for Health Institute at the University of California, Davis—and a yogurt researcher—says that while yogurt is a “nourishing food product,” the kind that’s dried, mixed with stabilizers and blanketed on dried snacks isn’t the same. “In general most of the attributes of fresh yogurt are lost in making coated snacks,” he says. That’s why the snacks you buy at the movie theater aren’t the real deal, agrees **Jennifer Willoughby**, a dietitian at Cleveland Clinic Children’s. But here’s the good part: making your own snacks from real yogurt is a tasty and healthy treat. “Choose a plain or vanilla yogurt to dip fruit or nuts in, and then freeze for a sweet treat with significantly less added sugar and more nutritional benefit,” she says.  Illustration by Lon Tweeten for TIME [_Read Next: Should I Eat Butter?_](http://time.com/3896448/butter-saturated-fat/) ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/3945988/yogurt-covered-raisins/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/3945988/yogurt-covered-raisins/"},"headline":"Should I Eat Yogurt-Covered Snacks?","datePublished":"2015-07-23T14:20:27.000Z","dateModified":"2026-05-11T05:02:40.000Z","description":"Yogurt-coated raisins sound like a double-dose health food. 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